December 4, 2017 AT 3:15 pm

Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group (now Airwide Solutions), sent the first text message to a mobile phone on December 3, 1992, from his personal computer to the Vodafone network to the phone of Richard Jarvis.

The text message read “Merry Christmas” (note, not “mry xmas” as it would most likely be abbreviated now, 20 years after this first text).

Omnipoint Communications, the first GSM carrier in America, set up the first text messaging service in the United States. Omnipoint soon after offered the first texting between the US and the rest of the world, starting a 160 character micro-blog trend that Twitter would make even more popular. (Twitter reserves 20 characters for non-message content and maintains a 140 character limit.)

We are angry, frustrated, and in pain because of the violence and murder of Black people by the police because of racism. We are in the fight AGAINST RACISM. George Floyd was murdered, his life stolen. The Adafruit teams have specific actions we’ve done, are doing, and will do together as a company and culture. We are asking the Adafruit community to get involved and share what you are doing. The Adafruit teams will not settle for a hash tag, a Tweet, or an icon change. We will work on real change, and that requires real action and real work together. That is what we will do each day, each month, each year – we will hold ourselves accountable and publish our collective efforts, partnerships, activism, donations, openly and publicly. Our blog and social media platforms will be utilized in actionable ways. Join us and the anti-racist efforts working to end police brutality, reform the criminal justice system, and dismantle the many other forms of systemic racism at work in this country, read more @ adafruit.com/blacklivesmatter

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